Every day there are ethical decisions that impact the hundreds or thousands of people who watch, read, listen, and/or click on a media source. The foundation for making the right decision starts with ethics classes in college. Students in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism will use this blog to reflect on ethical questions in the media today.

Sunday, September 22, 2013

The Easy Way to the Story

Amanda DePerro

ad320410@ohio.edu

How effective can journalists be as watchdogs for the
community when that community doesn’t trust them?

As public trust of mainstream media outlets continues
to decline, journalists need to be more wary of the choices they make
inside and outside of the newsroom. They need to ask themselves what effect
their actions may have on their audience. Any journalist who cares about their
audience hopefully would never sell (or attempt to buy) their credibility for any amount of money,
but of course these things happen.

We need to learn from example that good journalism comes
from transparency with our audience. If we don’t have our reader’s trust, we
don’t have anything. When journalists lie or cheat to get the story, that
reader feels betrayed. He/she trusted us to do our work in an ethical way to bring
the news to him/her. When we break that trust, we lose readership.

The only thing about journalism I hear more than how
mistrustful the public is of the media is the decay of newspapers and the
cutting down of newsrooms. If we expect to get a job at a publication, we had
better be ethical and want to improve the newspaper’s quality in order to gain
more readers and strengthen the bonds that current readers already have to the
publication.

Although a poll by Pew Research Center illustrates that many do see journalism as a way to
keep leaders from doing things that shouldn’t be done, only 26 percent think the
press gets facts straight, 20 percent think the press is relatively independent
and just 19 percent think that the press generally reports all sides of the
story. Those numbers are pretty horrifying, and journalists need to keep that
in mind while they’re preparing to report a story.

If we’re talking about being unethical and “cheating” to get
the story, the words that comes to mind are "News Corporation." Several publications
under News Corp, under Rupert Murduch, were found guilty of illegally paying
off police, as well as hacking into high-profile people’s phones in order to get
stories. Although this is obviously an extreme of unethical journalism, it’s
the perfect example of publications buying and cheating their way into stories.

Clearly the scandal had an effect on the public’s opinion as
well. Soon after the phone hacking scandal was uncovered, News
Corp. lost $7 billion in market value. The scandal lead to the closure of
one News Corp. publication, News of the
World.

After the scandal, other publications called for holding
Murdoch responsible, though he would only say the people he trusted and the
people thosepeople trusted were to be held responsible, and that he didn’t know that police payment and hacking had been going on. The boss not knowing what’s going on below him? Journalists
not getting their stories in an ethical way?To
me, that just sounds like a long line of people who haven’t been doing their
jobs—and they paid the price.

While it may be quicker and easier to get a story through
questionable means, the loss of public trust is never worth it. A journalist’s
job is to be an independent check on what’s going on in the world. If the watchdog isn’t doing its job correctly, who’s going to want to keep that watchdog
around?